Cluster Map

July 03, 2007

Doctors of Death

It is a historical fact, and an abiding conundrum, that so many organizations dedicated to the slaughter of innocents have numbered Physicians among their most devout and murderous adherents. One can draw a line directly from Dr. Mengele choosing life and death at Auschwitz to Dr. Zawahiri choosing death for thousands at a whim. The Palestinians, the modern day masters of terrorism, have numerous Physicians among their leadership. Dr. George Habash (a Palestinian Christian who embodies the concept of "Identification withthe Aggressor") led one of the most vicious and intransigent terrorist groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, a Pediatrician, was a co-founder of Hamas. The chinless Ophthalmologist, Bashar Assad, leads a government that routinely tortures and assassinates its political opponents. Now we learn that several, as many as 5 or 6, of the terrorists involved in the car bomb attacks in the UK are Physicians and the questions arise anew: What could transform a Doctor, someone dedicated to saving lives, into a monster dedicated to murdering innocents?

The New York Times, in their ever helpful quest to obfuscate, profess puzzlement over one of the Doctors, yet drop early hints in the article that the British were poor hosts to the immigrant Physician, apparently a Palestinian, born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Jordan:

NEWCASTLE-UNDER-LYME, England, July 2 — Mohammed Asha, the Jordanian-trained doctor who has been arrested, though not charged, in the terrorism plots in the Britain last week, was proud of his career accomplishments but fretful about his welcome in English society, friends and acquaintances in Jordan and Britain said Monday.

In this town in the English Midlands where Dr. Asha settled, Simon Plant, 34, recalled in an interview that when Dr. Asha and his wife were interested in renting a modest red brick three-bedroom house last year on a cul-de-sac named Sunningdale Grove, Dr. Asha had a pressing question on his mind. “He seemed very concerned about racism in the area,” Mr. Plant said.

Mr. Plant said that it soon became apparent to him that Dr. Asha’s wife, who was arrested with him on the nearby M6 highway late on Saturday, had experienced racism in the community where the family had lived in Shrewsbury in Shropshire. “It was weighing on him,” he said.

The very tired trope that racism, or its modern incantation of Islamophobia, somehow explains anything about one's transition to terrorism, is the kind of non-sequitor that increasingly presses our MSM toward irrelevance.

With the caveat that Dr. Asha may in fact be innocent, the Times article goes on to describe him as brilliant, arrogant, and short-tempered; a problematic mix in truth, but hardly explanatory.

Mohammed Atta was an architect. These men are doctors. It has been said that architects and doctors arrogate to themselves some of the creative and life-giving attributes associated with God, which idolatry or human presumption is said to be a terrible sin in Islam, though there are of course many Muslim architects and doctors. Moreover, these professions have been important in creating the Modern World.

There are men and women who can make an accommodation to life, and there are those individuals who are tortured by the contradictions between the real world and what they have been taught to believe as true. It is therefore not at all surprising that men in such professions as architecture and medicine come to embody the existential crisis of Islam in the Modern World and wind up choosing the evil path. Tragic, but not surprising.

Several trends intersect to produce Doctors of Death. The intellectual underpinnings go back to the Nazis, whose ideology forms part of the ideology of the Islamists, adapted to their interpretation of Islam. For certain types of Doctors who have an overabundance of intellect and an insufficiency of humanity, Physician training can be easily corrupted by ideology.

Physicians during their training must reconcile several seemingly contradictory impulses. In order to cure illnesses it is almost always necessary to first inflict greater pain. Early on, we learn that pain is a signal, it points to the source of the problem. Patients who enter an emergency room in terrible distress ideally should not be treated with pain killers until the Physician has a very good idea what the underlying problem is; the alternative, treating the pain alone without an etiology, risks masking the illness and leading to disaster. While pain medication should never be needlessly withheld, it is often necessary for the Doctor to allow for such pain in the service of the patient's greater well being. Worse, many times manipulations and tests must be done that actually make the pain a great deal worse before a diagnosis can be found and definitive treatment established. The only way for most Physicians to overcome their natural empathy is to objectify the patient in order to maintain an appropriate and helpful distance. Only by turning the patient into an object, for example, can the surgeon allow himself to cut into a human being, causing immediate terrible damage and pain, with the ultimate aim of curing or ameliorating. As our technology improves, the need for pain to direct treatment decreases, but pain will always be a part of Medical practice and, of necessity, so will objectification.

[This is applicable to Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy as well; if patients do not suffer from psychic pain, they have no real motivation for change. When a patient can not tolerate their psychic distress or only desires pain relief, medications that deaden the psychic pain may be necessary. However, when the desire for deeper and longer lasting change is evident, we must always monitor the optimal range of distress; enough to motivate and not so much as to dangerously destabilize.]

The Nazis took such objectification several steps further. They skillfully created an ideology, based on identity politics, that considered the population as a whole as an organic entity, akin to a person. The body politic was reified. Once such a conceptualization had been made, the step toward seeing certain sub-populations as being akin to infectious agents or tumors, causing illness and distress in the body politic, became inevitable. Medical Doctors then were tasked with curing the body politic by excising the offending sub-populations. The gas chamber followed.

Islam as practiced by the purveyors of Wahhabism, goes yet another step. Here the objectification of the sub-population is religiously sanctioned. Islamic states overtly treat non-Muslims as sub-humans, with limited rights, whose very existence is a stain on Islam, though Islam gains stature by not only tolerating such lesser beings but actually hold themselves out as moral and peace loving by protecting the "inferior" races and religions ("Muslim man's burden", perhaps.)

The confluence of the Nazi inspired objectification of entire populations with its attendant genocidal rationalization with the Islamic religiously sanctioned genocidal rationalizations, creates a powerful toxic mixture which can easily overcome the rationality of a Muslim Physician. Add in the tendency of the Muslim world to eschew any responsibility for their own suffering and the need to project all their hatred and failure onto others, and the Physician, in complete agreement with Mengele, Habash, Rantisi, and Zawahiri, takes it upon himself to "cure" his community by murdering the objectified other. Murder and suicide then become evidence of his loving devotion to the well-being of his people and all the while he keeps himself unaware of the sadistic hate that fuels his "treatment."

Comments

Doctors of Death

It is a historical fact, and an abiding conundrum, that so many organizations dedicated to the slaughter of innocents have numbered Physicians among their most devout and murderous adherents. One can draw a line directly from Dr. Mengele choosing life and death at Auschwitz to Dr. Zawahiri choosing death for thousands at a whim. The Palestinians, the modern day masters of terrorism, have numerous Physicians among their leadership. Dr. George Habash (a Palestinian Christian who embodies the concept of "Identification withthe Aggressor") led one of the most vicious and intransigent terrorist groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, a Pediatrician, was a co-founder of Hamas. The chinless Ophthalmologist, Bashar Assad, leads a government that routinely tortures and assassinates its political opponents. Now we learn that several, as many as 5 or 6, of the terrorists involved in the car bomb attacks in the UK are Physicians and the questions arise anew: What could transform a Doctor, someone dedicated to saving lives, into a monster dedicated to murdering innocents?

The New York Times, in their ever helpful quest to obfuscate, profess puzzlement over one of the Doctors, yet drop early hints in the article that the British were poor hosts to the immigrant Physician, apparently a Palestinian, born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Jordan:

NEWCASTLE-UNDER-LYME, England, July 2 — Mohammed Asha, the Jordanian-trained doctor who has been arrested, though not charged, in the terrorism plots in the Britain last week, was proud of his career accomplishments but fretful about his welcome in English society, friends and acquaintances in Jordan and Britain said Monday.

In this town in the English Midlands where Dr. Asha settled, Simon Plant, 34, recalled in an interview that when Dr. Asha and his wife were interested in renting a modest red brick three-bedroom house last year on a cul-de-sac named Sunningdale Grove, Dr. Asha had a pressing question on his mind. “He seemed very concerned about racism in the area,” Mr. Plant said.

Mr. Plant said that it soon became apparent to him that Dr. Asha’s wife, who was arrested with him on the nearby M6 highway late on Saturday, had experienced racism in the community where the family had lived in Shrewsbury in Shropshire. “It was weighing on him,” he said.

The very tired trope that racism, or its modern incantation of Islamophobia, somehow explains anything about one's transition to terrorism, is the kind of non-sequitor that increasingly presses our MSM toward irrelevance.